Restoring Mill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice and City Planning and Design

Injustices occur when human law and social practice ignore natural processes and when those who plan, design and build the city focus on a neighbourhood's problems and fail to recognize its resources. The story of the Mill Creek neighbourhood in Philadelphia illustrates these themes. Mill Creek is shaped by all the processes at work in inner-city America. It was laid waste by the flow of water and capital, and by the violence of redevelopment and neglect. Known locally as ‘The Bottom’, Mill Creek is one of many such ‘Black Bottoms’ in the US. They are at the bottom, economically, socially and topographically. Here, harsh socio-economic conditions and racial discrimination are exacerbated by health and safety hazards posed by a high water table and unstable ground. Landscape literacy is a means for recognizing and redressing those injustices through urban planning and design and community development, just as verbal literacy was a cornerstone of the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.